Introduce yourself! Share a little bit of what you do and who you help.
My name is Jacquelynn Cotten, I am a Spiritual Business and Life Coach who focuses on alignment and energetics, helping people in life and business. I help them elevate in life and business through energy work and through alignment work, so they can find happiness and fulfillment in both of those areas.
Tell us about your journey! What led you to this point?
My journey has been a wild one. I have overcome a lot of different kinds of abuse throughout my childhood. I have gone through relationships with a lot of narcissists, have overcome addictions, and part of that addiction was just seeking validation that came in the form of alcohol, partying, sleeping with a lot of men – just not valuing myself. There came a point in life where I was getting into trouble. I was waking up in hospitals, not knowing how I got there. I put myself through a lot of unhealthy and potentially dangerous situations.
That led me to many spiritual awakenings. In the midst of those awakenings, I found personal development, and it was a rabbit hole from there. I wanted to un-become everything that I knew I was. But I also wanted to become the person that I felt I was destined to be. Through personal development, after going down that rabbit hole, I found people like Dr. Joe Dispenza, Mel Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, people that could really get me to reflect on who I was and how I was showing up in the world.
I decided to give coaching a whirl after doing it my whole life without getting paid. From there, I went through more and more spiritual awakenings. Now, here I am teaching other people who are ready to pivot their lives in business to do the same, they become exactly who they desire to be, not who they think they’re supposed to be.
What would you say is your biggest achievement this far?
If we were to put a label on it, it would be the success that I have seen in my clients. It really brought everything together for me. All of the work that I had to do, all of the reflecting, all the pain, all the suffering, and wanting to evolve to become a better human being. I am here to leave an impact in a beautiful way. These are huge accomplishments for me – seeing my clients go from completely shy or sometimes negative, then make such a transformation in themselves and their self-image. Just seeing the transformations in them has been so incredibly validating.
One small example would be; two clients of mine, Julie and Drezden, both were earning around $2,000 a month when they first came to me. I was working one–on-one with them. In about three months, both quit their jobs in corporate America, went full time, are fully aligned and making between $10,000 to $20,000 a month consistently in a way that was and still is in alignment for them. They stepped in to the people that they want to be, not who everybody around them was telling them to be.
What’s the biggest piece of advice you would give the readers on how to overcome everything they’ve been taught and to step into who they really are?
Commitment and discipline, those two things. If you can be committed, and you can be disciplined, you can do anything. The strategy you use in life or business, it does not matter. The system doesn’t matter, the coach you hire, or the mentor you have. Anything that you want to become, if you make the commitment to yourself and then you stay disciplined, that creates consistency. With consistency that builds up to momentum. When you gain momentum, it’s really hard to stop.
Just make this commitment to yourself and just say, “I’m worth it, I’m absolutely worth it to just give it a consistent shot. I’m going to commit to myself, and then I’m going to be disciplined.” There are going to be days you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to do the work and you don’t want to un-become your habits. But you remember that you made a commitment, and now you’re going to stay disciplined. With discipline, you get to rewrite your story, and when you rewrite your story, you get to decide the ending.
I think that is the most beautiful thing that so many of us miss because we have our heads buried in our phones, or we’re comparing our success to other people’s success. In the midst, if you were just to make a commitment, stay disciplined and follow through with the things that you say you want to do, you would reap the benefits of all those rewards.
What would you say to somebody who’s struggling to stay disciplined and committed?
That’s absolutely human nature. When you come to realize that you’re only human, you allow yourself grace, and with grace, there is something so uplifting about that. It’s a reaffirming, forgiving, and positive feeling to know that, “You know what? I am going to screw up and I’m gonna fall off track.” When you have that level of self-awareness, immediately praise yourself and say, “Oh, sh*t, I did it again!” And just again, make that commitment to yourself to keep going and try again. It’s not that you failed, because I truly believe that the only way to fail is if you; one, never begin, because you didn’t even give it a shot, or two, you just give up. Once you give yourself the grace and realize we all mess up, you’re able to navigate through it all and say, “Okay, so if success comes with trials and errors, just like a video game, what next move do I make to get to that next level?” Sometimes we think too much about the end result. But it’s really just a matter of giving yourself grace and saying, “Okay, what’s the next tiny step I could take in the right direction?” And when you just take one little step. I like to think of it as a dopamine hit, you get addicted to the results and to the feeling of ‘I took another step. What’s next?’
